Bait & Switch (23 page)

“Okay,” the juggler said. “You’re on.”

Lizabeth turned to Grant, who looked a little sick. She felt a flash of guilt for pushing him into performing. It vanished when she heard the juggler’s lingering laughter.

“You heard him,” she said. “You’re on.”

“But I don’t want to be on,” Grant said.

“You have to be,” she whispered. “I told him how well you can juggle.”

“I’m still trying to figure out why.”

“I saw you at that talent show in high school. You were amazing.”

An emotion crossed Grant’s face which Lizabeth figured was resignation. But when he spoke, his voice sounded pained.

“That’s right,” he said. “How could I have forgotten? Wouldn’t expect that good old Grant can juggle. Who would have believed it?”

She squeezed his hand. “I know you’re shy about doing it in front of this crowd, but would you please juggle? For me?”

He released a long, soft sigh. Finally, he nodded.

Lizabeth clapped, anticipating the look on the juggler’s face when he got a load of Grant’s talent. She lifted her lips and kissed his cheek. “You won’t regret this.”

“Oh, yes, I will,” Grant muttered before he joined the egotistical juggler in the center of the circle. “What do I do?”

“Catch these.” The juggler picked up three brightly colored clubs and tossed one of them to Grant, putting a spin on it that made it rotate three hundred sixty degrees in the air. Then he prepared to throw the second.

“Show him your stuff, Grant,” Lizabeth yelled when the first club was still hurtling toward him.

Grant started on a high note. He caught the first club in his left hand and transferred it to his right in time to catch the second club. But when the third came hurtling toward him, he dropped all three.

“I’m a little out of practice,” Grant said.

Lizabeth frowned as Grant bent down to pick up the fallen clubs. What was going on? He was an excellent juggler. She’d seen it with her own besotted eyes.

The juggler with the silly pants took the clubs from him. “Perhaps we should try something simpler,” he said with a frosty air.

He threw a club that didn’t flip it all. Grant nabbed the first one and got it airborne but made the mistake of watching it while the second club was coming toward him. The second club struck him in the forehead.

“Ow,” Grant said.

“I was right,” the juggler yelled. “This man can’t juggle.”

“Yes, he can,” Lizabeth spoke up. “He’s just rusty.”

Grant rubbed his brow. “Yeah, I’m just rusty.”

The juggler strode over to his box of supplies, pulled out three juggling bags and tossed them to Grant. “Let’s see you juggle these.”

“How hard can it be,” Lizabeth heard Grant mutter before he flung the bags into the air. For a few precious moments, he kept all three of them rotating. Then, one by one, with Grant making unsuccessful lunges, they crashed to the pavement.

“Ha,” the juggler shouted. “He’s an impostor.”

Lizabeth stood stock still, gazing at the man with whom she was halfway to falling in love as the juggler’s words pierced her consciousness.

An impostor, he’d called Grant.

Grant gave her a wary smile, waved apologetically to the booing crowd and sauntered back to Lizabeth’s side. He flung his arm around her shoulders. “It’s like you said, I’m out of practice.”

But as they rejoined the milling crowd, Lizabeth was no longer reveling in the excitement of the night. She was thinking about why Grant couldn’t juggle. And why she kept seeing flashes of a different man under his surface. And how somebody who hadn’t played baseball since Little League could turn a team of losers into instant contenders.

The scenario that occurred to her seemed impossible, but she asked the question anyhow. “Grant, how old is your brother Cary?”

His smile appeared false around the edges. “What does age matter?”

“How old is he?” she persisted.

Just when she thought he wouldn’t answer, he said, “Twenty-eight.”

“Aren’t you twenty-eight?”

His Adam’s apple jumped before he gave her that charming, carefree smile of his. “We’re both twenty-eight. We’re twins.”

And then Lizabeth’s suspicion was no longer only a theory. Because in that moment she knew that the man she’d made love with, the man she’d been
falling in love with
, wasn’t Grant Mitchell.

It was his identical-twin brother Cary, the irresponsible former baseball star.

“WHY ARE YOU ASKING about my brother?” asked Grant, who wasn’t really Grant at all.

Lizabeth stared at him, the answer frozen on her lips. Why was Cary Mitchell pretending to be his brother Grant? It made about as much sense as his frequent trips to Miami. Maybe he was on an undercover mission where secrecy was all important. She frowned. That didn’t compute, either. Grant was the cop, not Cary.

“Leeza, did you hear me?” he asked. “Why did you ask about Cary?”

Tell him
, Lizabeth thought.
Tell him you know he’s an impostor, exactly as the juggler claimed
.

But she couldn’t make herself say the words. Not when she didn’t know why he was making those suspicious trips to Miami. Not when she herself was pretending to be somebody she wasn’t.

“No reason but curiosity,” she said, resolving to satisfy hers by following him when he disappeared later that night on another one of his forays.

She recognized the relief on his face before he drew her to him, kissed her on top of the head and pointed to the setting sun.

“It’s dropping,” he said.

The sunset started exactly like the one they’d seen the other night from the cruise ship, with the glowing sun majestic against a red and orange sky. The night was spectacular, warm and clear with only a single cloud in the sky.

“No, no, no!” someone yelled. A sea of disappointed voices soon joined in. From somewhere nearby, a young girl burst into tears.

Because that single cloud drifted nearer and nearer the sun until it completely obscured the sunset.

“Oh, well,” the man who wasn’t Grant said amidst the groans of the crowd. “We’ll see lots of other sunsets together.”

Lizabeth didn’t believe him.

It was as if the cloud were hanging over them, casting an ominous shadow.

CARY HEAVED ANOTHER crate into the trunk of his brother’s SUV, trying to shut off his brain so he wouldn’t worry about what was inside the thick wood.

It was no use. After the sunset they hadn’t seen, Leeza had asked why he couldn’t spend the rest of the evening with her.

He’d longed to tell her the truth, especially because he was starting to feel rotten about passing himself off as Mitch, but he’d dodged the question. Just as he’d averted near disaster earlier that night when Leeza had almost guessed he wasn’t the man he claimed to be.

He doubted Leeza would forgive him for impersonating his twin, but he was positive she wouldn’t condone the way he was smuggling crates to Miami.

He gulped as it struck him that smuggling was the right word. The worst part of it was that he didn’t know what he was smuggling. Captain Turk lugged the last of the crates from the U.S.S. Surprise.

“You swear these crates don’t contain drugs?” Cary asked
 

“You insult me,” Turk said, his breath coming hard from exertion. “I told you before, man. Turk and his crew don’t do drugs.”

Turk settled the crate inside the nearly full trunk, and Cary heard something clatter. If not drugs, he wondered, what could be inside the boxes? Cuban cigars wouldn’t clatter. Bottles of Cuban liquor would most likely clink. He considered illegal arms, but rejected the idea. Turk would be smuggling arms into Cuba, not out of it.

“What’s inside the crates?” Cary asked the question he swore he’d never ask.

Turk drew himself to his full height, which was still six inches shy of Cary’s. The wind kicked up from the Gulf, but Turk’s hair — or was that a toupee? — didn’t so much as rustle. His chartreuse tunic had a ghostly blue gleam in the moonlight.

“Hey, man, you want the money, you keep quiet. The deal was
no questions
. The less you know, the better.”

Turk was right. If Cary didn’t know what he was helping to smuggle, it wasn’t really smuggling. Just as he hadn’t really stolen money from Flash Gordon because it wasn’t stealing if the money was dirty.

Ha!

Cary recognized the sound of his conscience, laughing at him.

“You understand about keeping your mouth shut?” Turk asked.

Cary nodded, although he didn’t understand what was going on at all.

“Good,” Turk said, his demeanor instantly lightening. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. Don’t you think it would be cool if there really were Press-on warriors in the galaxy?”

“Don’t you mean Klingons?” Cary asked.

“Nah,” Turk said in an annoyed voice. “Klingons were in that other show.”

“Oh, right,” Cary said absently.

“I bet the Press-ons could keep the ozone layer from thinning,” Turk said and then droned on about a race of ozone-eating aliens.

Cary was no longer listening. His mind was still on the crates and their mysterious contents. And on what would happen if he got caught transporting them.

He cast a paranoid glance around the boat landing, and his attention snagged on something at the edge of the bushes. Something that had a weird green glow in the moonlight. He squinted, picking out a speck of red in the center of the greenish gleam.

Then, just like that, the glimmer of red was gone.

But Cary heard rustling, followed by the not-so-distant sound of a car engine, and he knew someone had been watching them.

Someone wearing an ugly broach of an octopus with a bright ruby-red eye.

Peyton massaged her temples as she waited for the red light leading from the City Marina to Lockwood Boulevard to change. The massaging wasn’t any more effective than the sea breeze that had blown over her parents’ luxury sailboat.

The headache had bloomed during an evening spent trying to ignore her mother pushing Gaston Gibbs at her.

Peyton’s throbbing head was partly her own fault. She should have been suspicious when her mother dabbed prettily at her eyes, claiming she didn’t understand why Peyton couldn’t spend all day Sunday with her parents rather than just part of it.

She should have figured out that Amelia McDowell would finagle it so that Gaston was on the sailboat with them while Mitch was on shore.

Peyton checked her watch to discover it was nearly midnight, which she’d claimed was too late to join Gaston for a drink but seemed like a fine time to come calling at her lover’s door. Time spent with Mitch should cure her headache. She smiled. Especially if they spent that time in bed.

A flash of red caught her eye and she glanced up to see a Miata traveling north on Lockwood Boulevard. The top was up, which made her think Mitch wasn’t the driver. Until she caught a glimpse of a profile so stunning it made her pulse skitter. Yes, it was Mitch all right.

She reached for her cell phone to call him, only to realize she didn’t have it with her. The light turned green and she swiftly decided to follow him. Wherever her lover was going, that’s where she wanted to be.

By the time she reached the Ashley River bridge, the Miata was about five car lengths ahead. Anybody driving at a decent clip would have lost her, but Mitch had developed a strange penchant lately for going the speed limit.

He’d done a lot of strange things lately, she thought a few minutes later as his car veered off Savannah Highway onto a darkened side street. Not the least of which was taking a midnight drive.

By the time she maneuvered her own car into the turn, she recognized the neighborhood. It was more commercial than residential, with a warehouse of some sort on the left and a strip shopping center she’d visited a few times on the right. The road led to a dead end, which brought up the possibility that Mitch had taken a wrong turn.

But then where was he? She pulled over to a curb, keeping her car idling while she wondered why she couldn’t see any taillights.

Her headlights caught a man in dark clothing walking onto the street from the direction of the warehouse. He shrank into the shadows but not before Peyton recognized Mitch.

Joy bubbled inside her, and she forgot her questions. She smiled, beeped her horn, pulled over to the curb and shut off her car. Then she was running across the street, where he seemed frozen in place.

“Peyton? What are you doing here?” he asked before she reached him.

“This.” She launched herself into his arms. His hands fastened at her waist while she pulled his head down and kissed him.

The headache immediately eased as now-familiar sensations assaulted her. The feel of his thick, silky hair; his clean scent; the intoxicating heat that hit her when he kissed her back.

Even though the passion that flared between them was no longer unexpected, she was still dazed by it. She wondered how she had the strength to remain standing when he finally broke off the kiss, set her from him and leaned his forehead against hers.

“That was an unexpected pleasure,” he said, his breaths coming as rapidly as hers. She laughed.

“It’s the only pleasure I’ve had all night. I spotted your car so I followed you to see what you were up to.” She leaned back and gazed into his face, which was cast in shadows. “What are you up to?”

She wondered at his hesitation.

“I was taking a walk,” he said.

“In this neighborhood? At midnight?”

He shrugged his broad shoulders. “I needed a change of scenery.”

She indicated his unremittingly black clothing. “Walking alongside the road dressed like that isn’t a good idea. Cars won’t be able to see you.”

“There aren’t many cars out at midnight.”

“Sure we are. There’s one now.” Peyton indicated a dark-colored vehicle pulling onto the street. When it got closer, she saw that it was a familiar green sedan.

“Oh, no,” Mitch said.

“Hey, what’s he doing here?” Peyton exclaimed at almost the same time. She disentangled herself from Mitch’s embrace and headed for the car at a quick trot.

“Peyton, don’t,” Mitch shouted, the puzzling words coming from close behind her.